> This feels very “PC” to me. By which I mean they’re selling it because they can sell new hardware. The Pentium 9 is out! Which is fine.

I mean, the same is happening for smartphones and tablets. Yes, it won’t dramatically grow the market.

But those already have mass market acceptance. They’re not trying to prove they’re necessary. The iPhone (and other smartphones) literally changed the world. There’s only so much they can innovate after 15 years of record breaking success.

VR doesn’t have that. People weren’t chomping at the bit for the day it was 20% better. Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.

Yes, and I don’t expect this to change much in the foreseeable future, given current technological constraints. But why would you expect a third-generation product to suddenly change this?

It’s a bit shocking mostly because of the scale of investment.

Meta alone has spent $36B on VR. To put this in perspective, iPhone development cost $3.6B. It’s the fastest, largest single investment into a new technology. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

For the cost of this object, we could have built 3 new subway lines in NYC WITHOUT dealing with our cost disease.

For the cost of the object, you could set up a university program to figure out Anglo cost disease, then build ~10 subway lines at Japanese costs.

Asking why our society funds things the way they do is a very reasonable and responsible question

As a slightly less wonky comparison, the entire market cap of Delta (the largest airline in the world by market cap) last year was $23B, so Facebook could've just outright purchased Delta and still had over $10B left over.

And then they could have gotten Delta to build a virtual reality headset!

(And possibly gotten a better outcome, seeing as Delta has a helluva lot more experience than Facebook with ergonomics and normal people)

This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.

> Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.

Depends on what you mean by relevance, 20 million Quest units have been sold which is more than Wii U lifetime sales (13.5 million), and about equals lifetime Gamecube sales and current Xbox Series S/X sales.

I'm sure it's not meeting expectations given how much they have subsidized them and how much they've spent on the metaverse, but I'm not sure I'd say the Quest itself is irrelevant. There's clearly an appetite for it.

>So what’s the killer app?

I feel like the answer to that question will come next year, when Apple's Vision Pro is out.

But that won’t help Meta.

This really feels like a Quest 2 + 1, which is fine. Same but better specs.

But the site appears to me like it’s positioning it as a Vision Pro competitor when it’s not even in the same league. “We have AR too so it’s the same!” The Vision Pro seems very clearly marketed at a different segment and primary use case to me.

The problem is that if Apple (or a 3rd party on the platform) figures it out I think there’s a good chance it can’t work well on a significantly cheaper headset like the Quest 3.

Then the Quest 3 may be the cheap thing that doesn’t do what people want. Like when you didn’t get an XBox 360 at Christmas because mom/dad got you a $25 TV plug-in Pac-Man game because “it’s the same thing”.

But Meta wants in on the party. And I feel like they’re trying to get their sales before the Vision Pro comes out and immediately becomes the thing that they get very unfavorably compared to (except price). Just like they rushed out a pre-announcement this was coming around the Vision Pro announcement.

Even if Apple face plants or never finds “it”and the Vision Pro isn’t successful I don’t see Meta being either. All these years and it’s still kind of “eh”.

Shooting to be the Android to Apple's Apple in this market doesn't seem like the least sensible strategy.

I feel like the "killer app problem" is not unique to the Quest, but the whole VR ecosystem. I'm being cautiously optimistic Apple will finally break through and find an app that will appeal to the masses, and even though the price is not attainable for 95% of the population, that will trickle down and find it's way to the broader market.

As stated before, YMMV, because the killer apps for me have been iRacing and DCS in VR. If you aren't into simulation games, VR isn't really there yet for your genre. FPS's are getting there, kinda. Your brain still has to remind your body to crouch. Beatsaber, tennis, there's some novelty games but if you're asking yourself why would you buy VR, you already answered your own question. You shouldn't. Apple's headset, like the iPhone, will take some time to get apps working and finding their market fit. I do have hopes that Apple's headset brings VR into a more "stable" marketplace. Instead of just the few niche titles here and there that you play with Valve's headset or Oculus/Meta Quest.

Simulation games will ALWAYS benefit from more VR, more hardware, more wheels, more human interface controls.

Are there any good sites for tracking "use this for this" with relation to VR?

I feel like this is what I really want to know. "I built a custom car cockpit, and use it, and it's awesome"

I agree fully. It’s not unique to the Quest. They’re just the most successful player so far (I think).

Apple isn’t target VR (though it works), they’re trying something different. So I’m curious if it succeeds.

Which won't release applications for the quest?

What if they can’t? What if whatever it is that makes the app so compelling automatically rules it out on the Quest 3 for some reason? What if it demands a better input method or higher resolution?

Then I'd be impressed, frankly. I've got the original Quest, and features you'd expect to be broken or missing (eg. hand tracking, multitasking, game streaming, web browsing, sideloading, et. al) all work fine.

It's honestly quite sad that the core line of rhetoric here is a laconic "what if" statement around theoretical apps. The Quest exists and has sold tens of millions of units; the Vision Pro has yet to prove itself. Unless you have a specific example, this can only be interpreted as wishcasting.

The quest sold millions at the beginning of a pandemic when people were trapped at home and needed an escape.

How many people still use it? How many regret the purchase, how many would have bought it without the pandemic?

I see that as Meta’s big opportunity to grab success in VR. And it didn’t happen.

They’re trying to market this like the next thing everyone needs and after multiple tries I just don’t see it. I don’t even see how they get there, this is the same strategy as the Quest, Quest 2, PSVR, PSVR2, etc. Games are great but that pitch just isn’t working at really moving the needle. But that’s all they have.

Games moved 20+ million units. That's 'the needle', unless your goal is to depose the iPhone. And clearly Meta is content to leave it alone, since the Quest even has an iOS companion app. They're complimentary products, not cannibalistic.

On the other hand, I can guarantee that most people who already own an iPhone will regret buying a Vision Pro. It's too expensive and too redundant to matter as a piece of hardware. It's not a market-redefining release like the Quest was, nor is it a proprietary solution to unfixable problems. It's an expensive thing, and for most people the Quest value proposition will align long before the Vision Pro value proposition does. The Hololens already tried this avenue too; merely offering a premium version of mixed reality doesn't work (even work when the military is your customer).

It'll be years before the dust settles, but the Quest has gotten undeniably far on it's own. You can rationalize that success however you want, but you'll consistently be confused if you hold it to unproven standards like "spatial computing". The Quest is the first Facebook product I've used where I can understand the vision at a consumer level and from a top-down level.

Yes, but competition

when teh apple vision comes out? CAD software!!

My personal killer app was enjoying the LiDAR imagery in Google Earth VR. Wish that it was actively developed and released for standalone.

I guess better AR support could allow some new types of things eventually but that probably won’t take off until you can walk around with in in daily life without it being awkward and uncomfortable

There's a bunch of very powerful/ successful AI girlfriend apps like Replika. I think that will be a breakthrough use case for VR.

If that’s the killer app for VR, then all I can say is god help VR.

Really? "All the lonely people..."

"Virtual Relationships"

If all the recent LLM stuff is any indication, I can't imagine they'll be very good. I think we've got a few decades to go before that can be anything other than a novelty.

How successful are those virtual girlfriend apps?

Last I checked, they removed a bunch of capabilities from Replika which caused a massive uproar on their subreddit and facebook.

Indeed. Based on "How angry are people when something is changed?", they seem to be pretty successful.

Which makes sense, what you remember LLMs are magic boxes that tell you what they think you want to hear.

GeForce Now.

XBox cloud gaming is pretty big. Roblox is huge with kids as well.

+1. I don't have a TV, so if I could just stream my macOS desktop and Xbox Cloud Gaming (which I already use) to a virtual 50+' screen that follows me as I walk around, that will be enough for me to buy in.

That seems to reinforce my point to me.

Both of those are available on other platforms. They don’t need the Quest 3.

Why not just buy an Xbox?

What makes me need a Quest 3?

You can play games on lower resolution, lower refresh monitors, so why do people market higher resolution and particularly higher refresh rate monitors succesfully to gamers? Quality if experience, not just binary “can you minimally do it”, matters, and matters particularly to the segment of the market that has lots of disposable income.

You can buy an XBox, but you won't be able to do anything VR related with it, so not sure what your point is.

It sounds like you've convinced yourself you don't need the quest, so just don't worry about it?

> So what’s the killer app? the porn app automatically locks the doors of your house to stop people "disturbing you"

I use my Quest 2 for mostly streaming from my PC games likes Asserto Corsa.

But... but... they made sure to put Gorilla Tag on the little games graphic... that doesn't do it for you?

Similar to the vision pro the killer app will eventually be AR.

Its pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.

Not sure if Quest 3 is there yet, but they're iterating towards it.

> It’s pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.

Is it? I don’t feel like it’s better right now (I know some people do, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority). Fixing the issues with VR is not trivial. There’s some deep flaws in the optics that we simply don’t know how to solve yet, and the weight needs to go down by a lot. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable wearing them more than a couple of hours when they’re entirely closed… but that’s a hard requirement for a good experience. There’s a bunch of hard contradictions in making good VR/AR.

Remember that as VR technology improves, so will monitors.

Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.

AR guy many years from now can instantly try a new 12-monitor setup while our dumb butts wait for 12 expensive things in the mail and then wire them all up. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have 16? More waiting. But nobody buys that many monitors. If it was just a number in a text file, people might try out a 16 monitor setup just for no reason.

The difference in capability could be massive, to the point we’d be truly amazed to jump into the future of AR. Not to mention the freedom of hands free portability, it could be wizard levels of awesomeness!

> Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.

Ok. Let’s say that’s done. Is it really that much more useful? It has to be good enough to overcome the friction of having to wear a headset and any limitations that come with it like heat, battery life, weight, resolution, etc.

I’m not convinced such a setup would significantly enhance productivity/usability even with hypothetical glasses that do it all, let alone something like a Quest on your head.

There's an underlying issue with the whole AR screen thing. They're heavily limited by the resolution of the screen in the goggles itself. These have a bit over half a 4k display per eye so you can only really have display resolutions of some fraction of that determined by what fraction of the area of a given eye display the fake screen takes up. If you blow it up until you're only looking at a portion of the screen you can have a larger one but then you're stuck to moving your head around to see your whole monitor. It's one of the big issues with the whole AR screen idea we'll need pretty beefy hardware to work around.

Is that pretty obvious? Better in what contexts?

I've seen someone here say that they really liked working with a virtual display from wherever, but the resolution of their whole display was 1080p. As someone who regularly uses dual 4k external monitors plus my laptop, I didn't understand how they could be productive. E.g. I may want to keep a browser with docs and a jupyter notebook of a particular investigation on my left, and an IDE of my repo on my right, plus chat with the colleague I'm working with below on my laptop, and all showing a lot of text or perhaps detailed graphs. If 8k monitors cross my affordability threshold before XR headsets with 4k (per eye) cross my affordability threshold, I would likely switch to more physical-screen pixels than to cut down to just 4k pixels strapped to my face.

Portability is an obvious pros for virtual displays. It can be used on any hotels only with less than 1kg HMD and accessories.

I agree that's pretty obvious when it gets there. I think we just disagree on how far we are from that point. I think there's essentially no chance that the Quest 3 is good enough, and would put the hypothetical over/under[0] on that happening somewhere around 15-20 years out. The software to take full advantage of it isn't there either, and I don't think it can be meaningfully developed at all until the hardware is a lot closer.

[0]- Since we're on HN, I need to say -- this is a figure of speech. I am not offering or soliciting any actual wagers here.

When Valve releases a stand-alone headset that can play regular PC VR games that will be what changes the VR market. Until then it'll be just, "more of the same." Minor improvements/evolution, etc.

Biggest thing the industry could do in order to move VR/AR forwards would be to adopt SteamOS or a similar "normal" Linux OS and give end users root. That would really be a kick in the ass towards real innovation more than, "slightly better tracking; slightly lighter; now with color pass through!"

>and give end users root.

I like the idea but the vast majority of people buying smartphones don't have root and it rarely bothers them.

Hackers can build an ecosystem. So it doesn’t really matter what the vast majority do imho.

The year of the linux desktop!

You can do this with the Quest 2 right now via AirLink. I do it all the time.

You're talking about streaming/remote control of a PC which can involve significant latency and lag spikes (unless you're tethered with a good USB cable). That is by definition not a stand-alone headset. You're just using it as a fancy VR dongle.

This necessitates two things:

    * Your PC is powerful enough to run VR games
    * Your PC is in an area that's convenient to play (with plenty of room)

Nearly all Quest 2 users are using it stand-alone. They're not hooking it up to a PC. There's a tiny fraction of users that do the PC VR thing with Steam but that's so small as to be negligible in the overall market.

You're actually kind of making my point: Imagine if you didn't need the PC or the tether and could just play those great, easy-to-mod PC VR games directly on the headset. The market for VR would undergo a massive, positive change.

I'd also like to point out that tethering limits the fun you can have! Example: https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=7668607

You can't play Beat Saber like that if you're tethered.

If you don't have a PC powerful enough for VR then you're probably not going to drop a lot of money on a combined PC+VR headset either.

I bought a cheapish wifi router to use for dedicated AirLink and I do SteamVR -> Quest 2. It works great. No latency (but I will admit the very occasional lag spike, it doesn't bother me and I don't miss a note while Beat Saber is going super fast, so it can't be that bad)

Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)

"The very occasional lag spike" completely destroys the ability to play Beat Saber. It'll drive you crazy (as it did me)!

...and I too tried dedicating my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Wireless Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US) just for the headset to see if that would improve things (set it up with a new hotspot name so it'd be dedicated and only told the headset about it). The Wifi AP was on the wall just about 3 feet from my head and I still got the occasional lag spikes and I confirmed that they were due to the Wifi network (not just rendering spikes on my PC).

There's just too much random interference on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands for it to be buttery smooth. I suppose I could turn my house into a Faraday cage and that might improve things :)

That's your experience. GP has had a different experience that works for them, and maybe would for others.

> * Your PC is powerful enough to run VR games

So you want powerful enough PC on your head? It's impossible for everyone. Valve doesn't make a chip. Even for Apple, their chip is great but not comparable with powerful GeForce.

The CPU/GPU part of the device does not need to go on your head. Manufacturers make it that way for convenience (and lower part count) but that doesn't necessitate that stand-alone headsets be made like that. Apple, for example has the battery in a separate little dongle that you're supposed to put in your pocket. If they can do that there's no reason they couldn't put the CPU/GPU hardware elsewhere too.

The Steam Deck can play some VR games just fine. It just wasn't made for that purpose so as it stands it's currently sub-optimal. With a few minor changes that very same chip/hardware could make a decent VR headset.

>So what’s the killer app?

There isn't one and there never will be because people like different things.

Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out? I've been doing VR since oculus dk1 and VR has been crazy enjoyable from time to time. VR is cheap as hell now. Quest2 was $300 for quite some time even before the Quest3.

If you can't find enjoyment with virtual reality from a $300 stand alone device that's a you problem.

> Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out?

It’s asking for the use case. If there isn’t a use case outside gaming, there is no value on the table for non-gamers.

Gaming is a huge market, and if you go in to any free to play game it's absolutely inundated with kids/preteens.

You can also roam using apps that let you do Google street view stuff in VR, create art, watch movies in a theater like experience alone or by yourself, and of course a lot of people use it for porn.

Even usual non-gamers love stuff like Walkabout Mini Golf or Star Wars Pinball.

Gaming is a huge market.

What portion of that market is VR?

That’s the issue I see. Gaming may be the best thing in VR, but VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer at all. It’s still a small niche.

>It’s still a small niche

So what? Go play and enjoy.

>VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer

Not even sure what that means. You come across as someone who likes to complain and never actually enjoy something. Good luck with that.

I miss the Google Cardboard I used to revisit places I traveled to, is there an app that really give access to Google Street View on the Quest 2?

Yep, there are. Wander is one, though I think there are others. You can even do it multiplayer, which is how my wife and I use it.

Ah, I heard about Wander before but when I looked into it I wasn't sure you could really see all the pictures from anywhere on Google Street View. Thanks!

For the price i would consider it as an alternative to buying a new PC screen. If it allows that.

There's no way you wouldn't have a massive headache wearing that 8-12 hours a day?

I've watched Netflix movies with no issues. The max session time I've ever done in VR is about 4 hours but that was playing a game and had no issues except the imprint from the headset in my forehead... I definitely know people that can't play at all without feeling sick though so ymmv.

only 12 hours? :)

Fair point.

I play VR shooters for 3-6 hours most days of the week.

What’s the killer app for a PC?

Originally, it was Excel/Lotus 123.

Later, it was the web browser.

Nowadays, it's mostly games.

Web browser and Excel are still killer apps for PC. There's way more PCs used for that, than for games.

Yeah - Excel and other 'productivity' apps are probably still the killer apps for PCs, especially for businesses. I assume businesses still drive the majority of PC purchases.

Some other factoids:

There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.

There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.

Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.

Seems its excel again lol, they're bringing MS office to the quest

I'd say I exclusively used the Go and the Quest I've had to play games

Right. It was Wordstar instead of a typewriter. VisiCalc instead of ledgers book. Photoshop. PageMaker or Quark Xpress. AutoCAD.

Over and over as computers got more powerful new killer apps appeared that changed the way people worked and the world did its business.

VR doesn’t appear to have anything like that. Just a small niche of the gaming market.

...and remember, the smartest people in the world (including some super-perceptive folks like Jaron Lanier) innovated in this space in the 1990s -- no one back then was able to come up with a "killer app" back then. The hardware has gotten smaller, and we have more pixels.

Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?

I remain skeptical...

Exactly. I think Apple is doing something fundamentally different by emphasizing AR so much that they built the hardware around it with ultra-high resolution screen and no controllers.

If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.

But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?

> VR still doesn’t seem to have advanced much in software to me.

Let's put our imaginations together. What use case for VR do we all wish we could see/can we think of that we don't see yet?

I want to walk into my back yard and visualize a new garden, then check on it through the year and get info on what the plants need. Same thing with my house and layout/furniture. Let me stand in a hotel room in a city I'm not familiar with and look around at the town around me, x-ray style.

> I want to walk into my back yard

Aren't the VR headsets wired?

Some can be used standalone, like the Quest.

No, Quests are mobile, that's why they have such low processing power

Quest 2 grew the VR market by ~10x. What was the killer app? Beat Saber is the first install, but not what kept it going for 3 years.

It's the ecosystem. VR Chat for some, social game for others, immersive experiments like Bonelab, and a few studio titles.

I'm glad Meta didn't hype the Quest 3 too much. It's easy for VR expectations to outrun current tech. VR seems to be in the trough of disillusionment where it's moving forward (2023 games are way more playable than 2021 games) but it's a slow burn. "Hey this isn't a step change" is probably right about the Quest 3, but I think also misses the bigger picture. It's a platform and people are still figuring out what to build on it.

Beat Saber is still hella fun. I know some people that just play that (but play it daily) on their Quest. I'm not sure Facebook is particularly happy about that, however, since those people aren't buying apps or making them much money (maybe just the occasional song pack).

I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.

honestly, if the quest weren't tied to an account I would have considered getting one just to play beat saber too. it's fun and you feel like you're getting exercise at the same time.

Beat Saber really is lots of fun. It really has that DDR vibe, and you don't need super expensive equipment to do it.

I only connected with my facebook account a few months ago, I guess was grandfathered in under the previous system until they nagged me to do it.

The song packs come out really slowly too. They've released just one song pack with 11 songs on it this year, the Queen one back in May, as well as added 10 songs to existing song packs. For a total of 21 songs total this year so far.

And 210 official songs since it first came out back in 2018.

Meanwhile the PCVR version has a ridiculous 65,000[1] custom songs made for it at this point.

Not sure why they can't get closer to the Rock Band model, where it released new songs all the time, and had 2,743 songs total (and 84 songs THIS YEAR according to Wikipedia[2]...had no idea there was even an actively supported Rock Band game out there still).

Beat Saber should be making them enough money to allow them to at least do double or triple what they're doing now.

[1]: https://bsaber.com/ultimate-guide-to-beat-saber-custom-songs...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_downloadable_songs_for...

I agree! But the modding...that is all legally dubious, it makes sense that Meta can't just release whatever song they want. I wish it could be attached to spotify or something: you get to listen to the song because you have a subscription, and just play custom beat saber levels with it.

Heck, I would be happy if they just were able to do as well as Konami did with DDR. But Meta seems to be taking a slow growth approach on Beat Saber.

I understand they need to get the rights to it, I'm just surprised they aren't more aggressively doing so. Rock Band has shown it should be doable to negotiate a lot more licenses more quickly than they have.

I understand they like to make a bit of a visual stage experience to each song pack, but not every song pack needs that necessarily, and they should also be able to have multiple teams working on song packs in parallel you'd think, as opposed to one every once in a while, even if they insisted on making new visual themes for each one.

As it is, I'd love to buy more song packs from them, but I'm not that into Queen, or Lizzo, or several others they've done the past couple of years (Electronic Mixtape released in May 2022 was the last one that excited me). And other people have their tastes too. Putting out songs more often insures that people have something new they can support and a reason to get back into it more than once every other year.

The reason I brought up the custom songs, is they could potentially use those for ideas of what players would really like to see in the game, based on custom song usage, as well as possibly once they do get rights to those songs, possibly get permission from the creator to use the beat patterns (or whatever they're called) and save some development time.

I know they hired at least one person from the custom song community before, they could potentially get permission from some others (with some compensation).

I had a discussion with someone who had some real knowledge, and they said Meta can't really make a business with Quest just via Beat Saber. It has some backing, but not a lot of backing, most of their effort on Quest are elsewhere.

I totally get that, I just wish it wasn't so. To me, Quest is the ultimate fitness/active but casual gaming device.

You can get custom songs on Quest, I have probably 99% of my Beat Saber play time on them, search for BMBF on google.

I tried going down that rabbit hole once, and it seemed to break things (although I didn't spend a ton of time on it). I own it on Steam too, so I can play custom songs via that. It's just that's tied to my computer upstairs and I usually prefer to play untethered in my living room.

Most of my custom songs on the Quest I've done have actually been for the game Ragnarock, because it doesn't require sideloading anything, just copying files onto your Quest from your computer. That one is quite fun also.

I also have my computer upstairs and Quest in living room, but found that playing through Virtual Desktop works very well.

It does give extra peace of mind having the games run locally on the device in case of connection issues, and to avoid the occasional need to run upstairs to fix something.

Haven't really tried gaming using Virtual Desktop, just browsing on the computer. Maybe I should give that a try sometime.

> I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.

Not sure about that[1][2]...

1: JP: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...

2: KR: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...

>Quest 2 grew the VR market by ~10x

Did it really? So far I don't see any uptick in anything VR related in terms of average daily use.

I read somewhere that most people get VR, try it for a week, then get bored of it.

In terms of hardware sales, yeah. But I agree I’m not sure the users stuck around.

It feels almost like a fad. It was in the right place at the right time by being available when people were in lockdown early in the pandemic. And it sold out, which of course increased demand more.

But three years later, things don’t feel that different from 1/1/2020. It feels like that wave came and went without any long term change in things.

I meant headset sales since I've never been able to find actual usage numbers. Afaict, on usage, everyone is guessing.

I had fun for about an hour using virtual turn tables to mix my music collection, but after awhile it just felt kind of dumb - awkwardly fiddling with knobs in a virtual world with no tactile feedback. It's like it got me halfway towards being productive, but the quality of inputs and feedback are so poor that I quickly reached a ceiling. When it comes to actually getting things done, in my experience VR just gets in the way.

AR on the other hand is something I could easily see becoming useful. One cool use case that immediately comes to mind are instruction manuals. You get a new piece of furniture from Ikea and the AR instructions identify pieces you have laid on the ground and directs you where to put it. Or Legos, right? Real world inputs, and real world results.

Eleven Table Tennis. It's so much fun. The controller is the same weight as a paddle, and it's responsive enough to "feel" right. It's really improved my game and is a surprising amount of exercise.

A lot of kids are spending most of their waking hours in VRChat right now. It's pretty addicting once you have a group of friends in there...

Also (as lots of adult VRChat users will complain about), it's a way to get free babysitting from the internet for your kid.

The internet babysits the minds of children and adults alike. Go to any restaurant and you'll see entire families all glued to their phones.

Yea and everyone is getting in shape from VR too...

These are bogus marketing lines that people puppet back to each other.

I know 20 some kids and not a single one has even the slightest interest in VR.

It is really shocking to me how these kids that can play games all the time have absolutely no interest in VR. It is not uncool or passe, it is just absolutely nothing to them.

It is a niche product that enthusiast oversell because the reality is that most people just don't care.

Not marketing. In reality, tens of thousands of kids are spending ridiculous amounts of time in VR. They will grow up, normalize it, and the next wave will be much much bigger. Sounds like you haven't seen or experienced what I'm talking about, so you have no idea, just your anecdotes.

My kids are on Gorilla Tag and Roblox all day and I complain about it the same way my parents did about the all time I spent in chatrooms and forums back in the day.

It's a slow roll, but I think the seed has been planted.

I've found BigScreen (https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software) to be a fairly compelling killer app case for VR. Besides being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're in a movie theater, the social elements are great. On a weekly cadence I jump into a shared room with 6+ of my friends and we pick a bad movie to watch together as we MST3k it. There's something about positional audio when talking with someone that makes it easier to replicate the experience of hanging out in person versus a video meet.

We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.

All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel closer to the real thing.

I haven't got to use VR much, since my apartment is too small for it, but I have played a few rounds of VR racketball.

I have no interest in VR videoconferencing, but shared presence is surprisingly interesting. When you've both got headsets and headphones on, you can't tell the difference from playing in the same room as your friend, even if you're physically hours from one another.

Big screen has the most toxic online community I have ever interacted with. I know there is worse out there but the amount of anti-LGBTQ chat I hear was disturbing for a place that is about watching movies.

Yeah, I wouldn't wade into anything public there - stick to private rooms with your friends. The moment you go into any sort of "I want to meet strangers" in VR setting you're really rolling the dice. I briefly hopped into the "shared lobby" for Big Screen at one point and encountered probably 3 or 4 negative internet stereotypes immediate (14 year old yelling obscenities, someone trying to hump my face, and someone just blasting noise so loud through their mic it was painful). Very much something you would only want to experience with trusted parties.

The killer app is a fun way to do fitness either alone or socially without having to go to the gym and without getting bored since the workouts are dynamic and unreal ie dodging bullets and fighting monsters

If you’re not active, and don’t want to be active; you’re not going to like it beyond watching movies in a virtual movie theater

For me it's sim racing - for other people it's exercise apps, for educational users it's immersing students in ancient Greece.

Sim racing is amazing in VR - I got instantly faster, able to judge distances better, and the immersion is top notch.

What's the killer app of the iPhone 15?

They are releasing something like 50 new games, though they aren't making them exclusive, which follows what consoles seem to do now too.

The killer app for me has been being able to hop on to a VR game with my friends and somewhat feel like we're in the same room. It's too hard to get together frequently, and even setting up a VR 'date' is hard, but it's something.

usb c

No one needs to be convinced to buy a smartphone. They changed the world. People already want them.

VR is not in that position. It needs to prove its utility if it ever wants to escape being a niche.

> So what’s the killer app?

What's the desktops killer app? What's mobile's killer app?

Computing to me is a general purpose system, which grows holistically. This kind of search for certainty, trying to annoint some specific app as the thing that a form factor is all for, is actively harmful to understanding the role of compute & how it fits into augments & enriches so many diverse different things we do.

Creating comfortable computing spaces is never going to be a fast burn. It's taken decades for the desktop to mature. This is a harder challenge, enmeshing with reality rather than being so tightly a self contained system.

I have a lot of questions & uncertainty about how computing rolls out a presence beyond the screen & into the world. It's unknown to me and maybe it flat up fails & never works. But I'd like some respect & acceptance that this is an open ended thing, not going to be so conveniently compact & singular as this ask tries to reduce it to. Searching so hard for certainty is dangerous, rejects the pioneering & open endedness & intergativeness that most rich complex & capable long lasting systems endure through. Let's not be so rash in demanding all our answers ahead of time.

> What’s the desktop’s killer app?

We know that. It’s happened. Wordstar, VisiCalc, Photoshop, PageMaker or Quark Xpress, AutoCAD, Netscape Navigator, AOL. They, and their descendants, moved billions of units.

> What’s the mobile’s killer app?

Chat. Maps. The internet. Uber. Dating. Use as a camera. Email. Shopping. Again, billions of units.

No one has figured out a non-niche application for VR. Normal people don’t care. It’s not even on their radar.

That’s my point. More of the same isn’t going to change that. They either need the app to make it break through or some improvement that allows that app. This is a spec bump. Nice to those already interested, unlikely to attract new people.

Apple is trying something. They’re throwing hardware at it, especially in terms of a very very high resolution screen. They think that will make the difference, even given the price.

We’ll find out. But at least they’re trying something different. Because I don’t see why this would jump into the mainstream.

Hindsight is 20/20.

You have listed a dozen many-billion dollar sectors that have had massive impact on the world, stemming from computing. But it took decades for mass market productization to emerge in most of these areas.

Very very few were so clearly poised to take over. It's easy to point out established computing's wins. But you are demanding certainty & proof, & not granting a nascent form factor any time to find it's footing, to establish it's value.

Quest 3 seems to be .massively expanding the fidelity of the Quest 2's pass-through mode. You talk about Apple trying something, and I think they are, but Meta has been driving similar capabilities, if not harnessing them to such a sensible multi-tasking OS core.

VR suffers from inherent issue that its in a weird space of half immersion - the visuals are there but the motion feedback is not. The closest you can get is a VR motion racing rig, but those are prohibitively expensive. Even without the motion rig, generally 3 screens are often preferred due to better resolution and not having to wear a bulky device.

Besides some fun exercise games and social stuff like VR chat which is fun for a minority of people, once the novelty of 3d wears away, you are left with something that isn't as relaxing as sitting down and playing a regular game.

I think it's interesting to think about it as a hardware evolution question. If you look at a timeline of what it took to get to the modern smartphone, you could (arguably) say:

PalmPilot -> Handspring -> WindowsCE -> Blackberry -> iPhone -> Android -> Modern Smartphone

Each one of those evolutionary steps brought in a larger user base and grew the feature set of the prior generations hardware. The VR/AR/XR market comes with its own set of challenges so imagining where it maps onto that timeline is hard, but I would guess we are still more in the Handspring - WinCE era of these devices.

Wearable display systems have a solid and growing user base but the hardware is still a ways off from something that will have mass adoption. The roadblock is very much in the hardware, not the software IMO.

Pass-through VR porn has gotten really big in the past 6 months, and I'll just say I know that a LOT of people are waiting for the quest-3 entirely for that.

You completely missed everything about mixed reality. That is the killer selling point for Meta Quest 3.

This hardware has the capacity to do almost everything that Apple's device can do for a fraction of the cost (just not with Apple integration).

Walkabout Mini Golf VR

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1408230/Walkabout_Mini_Go...

I wonder if they'll include the photo-realistic avatars, like what was demonstrated between Zuck and Lex Fridman.

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1707453830344868204